Thursday, 5 November 2015

Artistic Insight: Uzo Egonu

Artistic Insight: Layla Gatens is a recent graduate of the University of East Anglia, studying History of Art and Anthropology. Here she explores Uzo Egonu and his work, Portrait of a Guinea Girl.

Uzo Egonu, Portrait of a Guinea Girl, 1962, Oil on Canvas

The internationally renowned modern
painter, Uzo Egonu, explored the relationship between painting and sculptural
forms, fusing his western and non-western influences to evoke a different kind
of modernism. Painting at a time when the anti-colonial struggle was gaining
momentum, Egonu’s work came to negotiate political themes of domination, racism
and oppression. No Colour Bar: Black
British Art in Action 1960- 1990 feature’s a rare and exciting example of
Egonu’s figurative work; Portrait of a
Guinea Girl (1962).

Egonu’s Portraitof a Guinea Girl
(1962) explores the artist’s nostalgic feelings towards his homeland, whilst
marking a crucial moment in the development of his personal aesthetic. Egonu’s
oil painting depicts a young, Guinean girl, dressed in traditional West African
outfit with a matching head dress and jewellery. The girl, with a neutral
expression, leans forward with her arms crossed. The rigid pose, powerful
graphic style and vivid colours draw similarities with Gaugin’s female subjects
in his paintings of Tahiti in 1891-1892.

After moving from Nigeria to
England at the age of 14, Egonu studied painting and printing at Camberwell
School of Arts until 1951. Graduating in an era of increasing cultural
awareness, the global opposition to imperialism became crucial to the young
artist’s process of cultural self-definition. This period of anticipation and
political excitement led Egonu to spend much of his time in the offices of the
West African students union. Like the Walter Rodney Bookshop that inspired the No Colour Bar exhibition, this provided
young migrant students such as Egonu with “a place to read newspapers, engage
in long discussions about the times and generally feel at home”. (Oguibe, 2004:
61)

In 1952, Egonu travelled Europe to
expose himself to major works from the renaissance, cubism and surrealism, as
well as those from Africa. During this period, Egonu was also engaging with the
philosophy of the Negritude movement, which encouraged a common racial identity
for Africans worldwide, and emphasized nostalgia as the core of their
philosophy. After initially struggling to give form to his new conceptual and
cultural ideas, Egonu’s creative crisis was solved by the route of memory and
recollection, leading him to produce Portrait
of a Guinea Girl - a celebratory, heroic portrait of an African female. The
image romanticizes, valorises and reclaims the notion of ‘home’, positioning the
girl as the embodiment of a future ‘Mother Africa,’ a vision of the beauty and
potential of the African continent. With this view, Portrait of a Guinea Girl thematically and conceptually alludes to
the 1945 poem Femme Noir, by
negritude writer Léopold Sédar Senghor:

Naked woman, black
woman

Clothed with your
colour which is life, with your form which is beauty

In your shadow I
have grown up; the gentleness of your hands was laid over my eyes.

And now, high up on the
sun-baked pass, at the heart of summer, at the heart of noon,

I come upon you,
my Promised Land,

And your beauty
strikes me to the heart like the flash of an eagle.

-Extract from Femme
Noire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, 1945

Portrait of a Guinea Girl marks the beginning of Egonu’s crucial
link with ‘home’, a theme that continues throughout his body of work.Egonu continued to assert his African background
with forms of European modernism, and in turn achieved an expression that was committed
to his identity as an African artist in Britain, as well as his socio-political
vision. Through his painting, Egonu confronted the barriers between Western and
African art, and went on to overcome the processes of exclusion that made
British galleries and exhibition spaces inaccessible to artists of non-European
descent. By the 1960’s Egonu was a revered leader of the avant-garde scene in
London.

See Uzo Egonu’s work, as well as many other seminal artists at the 'No
Colour Bar: Black British Art in Action 1960 - 1990' exhibition at the
Guildhall Art Gallery until 24th January 2016.